


all is fair in love and war

by yoshimiforestmagdalene



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:14:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29800698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yoshimiforestmagdalene/pseuds/yoshimiforestmagdalene
Summary: i wrote this a long, long time ago when i was hyperfixating on avatar. i always planned to finish it but i’m not really into avatar anymore so i don’t think i will. keep in mind that it’s more unfinished, shallow vignettes rather than any deep explorations as i planned.
Relationships: Azula & Ozai (Avatar), Azula & Ursa (Avatar), Azula & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	all is fair in love and war

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this a long, long time ago when i was hyperfixating on avatar. i always planned to finish it but i’m not really into avatar anymore so i don’t think i will. keep in mind that it’s more unfinished, shallow vignettes rather than any deep explorations as i planned.

Her father jumps, swipes out his leg and blasts. Zuko rolls and ducks. Her father charges forwards and skids, leaves a trail of blue in his wake. Zuko leaps over it as if it were a jumprope—long legs tucking up in tandem—takes a firm stance opposite. Her father lashes fire like a whip, cracking it unrestrainedly. Zuko swerves, a line of stray flames just licking the pale expanse of his back. Her father squeezes the fire into a circle around Zuko, steps forwards and breathes it back in through his nose. Zuko bends a knee.  
  
Azula doesn't miss the way her father's face scrunches as he burns Zuko. Coward, she thinks: if that were her, she'd be bearing a smile.  
  


* * *

  
She isn't supposed to be awake at this time of night. But she isn't supposed to do many things, most of which she does anyway, but few of which Zuko does. Yet it's near midnight and his whines and whimpers echo through mazes of corridors. It is near midnight and he is awake. The tiles are cold under her bare feet as she navigates the halls. She wants to see him, not unlike the way that a cat might watch a pretty bird in the garden. By the time she reaches his room, the door is already ajar by a centimetre, a column of orange light thinly spilling onto the floor. She bends down low and cracks it open a few more, hollowing out her cheeks and blowing just light enough for it to be audible—the wind is as good a cover as any, especially since Iroh taught her how to copy its whisper. (That fat oaf might just be good for something after all, she thinks.)  
  
First, she sees Zuko on the bed, twitching and jerking in place, frowning and slick with sweat with the droplets coloured orange by spasming lantern-light. But to the left of him—gripping his hand tightly, smoothing over his forehead with a delicate hand—is their mother. She's... cooing at him, like he's a deer been pierced by a bow, or a helpless little bird missing a wing. It's—  
  
It's pathetic!  
  
Azula edges closer.  
  
Her mother smooths down his hair. Her fingers are like air, like the wind she'd pretended had prodded open the door, so... gentle. So tender. Ursa smiles and her eyes are tired, but full of something. Something warm. Something like the look in Zuko's eyes as he tears off a chunk of bread to offer the turtleducks. Something like the gentle pressure of Iroh's hands as they press over Lu Ten's uniform before he's due to depart. Something like Azula has never known. So Azula, tentatively and without thinking, brings her own hand to her hair. Pats down her scalp. She thins her eyes. Her hand is cold, clammy, and there's nothing special about the sensation. But Zuko eases into their mother's touch, his frown smooths into something less strained. She pats her head again, only quicker this time, with much more ferocity. She rubs at her hair—nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing!  
  
"Azula?"  
  
Azula's head snaps up and her mother fixes her with a look she cannot place. That something is gone, and curling in its place is the familiar pinch of pity between those knitted brows. Azula feels like one of the bugs she used to stick a needle through and pin to the grass. Exposed, flayed open. A breeze rips through her, but its warm, and it rolls her stomach around in a way she's never known before. Grunting, Zuko lifts his head from the pillow. She darts back to her bedroom.  
  


* * *

  
It is not often that Azula dreams. She has schooled herself to fall into a visionless sleep each night, so that come morning there's nothing for her to struggle to leave on the pillow; nothing for her to carry around quietly for the rest of the day; no memory from the past to re-emerge and haunt her like a ghost, take up board in the empty halls of her unconscious mind and linger there even after they fill with wakefulness.  
  
But she is somewhere else tonight.  
  
It has been many years since she dreamt, yes, but it has been even more than her last nightmare. Very few things scare Azula, and that is because very few things are realistic and rational enough to pose such a threat to her that warrants fear. But nightmares are different. As wild as they may be, they can still leave her shaking and shuddering, and she curses them for this exact reason.  
  
Tonight, she wakes in her bedroom, except she has not awoken at all. The light cast is blue, not orange. Blue like lightning. This is her bedroom, but it is not. It is a phantom, a slice of some other reality.  
  
A nightmare.  
  
In sweat and tears, she wakes. She has never woken in sweat and tears, but here she does, and she cannot control it. She cannot control the whines and whimpers that escape her either, bound entirely to the sounds as they claw their way up her unwilling throat. Crying and writhing, Azula lays for hours until the door cracks open and a shadow slips in. It closes over slightly, and the shadow forwards, cast in light.  
  
Ursa.  
  
Azula's dream mind is clouded, fogged and steamed over, but it becomes clear to her that this is familiar. Her mother is supposed to step forwards, to stroke her head tenderly, to whisper and coo lovingly as though she is a deer or a bird wounded. Except she does not. She stills, wavers. She does not blink. She stares. Azula cries, and she stares. Azula writhes, and she stares. Azula screams, and she cracks the door open and slips out once more.  
  
Azula awakes with a start, springing from the bed and panting. Her room is cast in orange, and outside is black. She runs her fingertips over her skin, the silk of her pyjamas, the soft strands of her hair. Her bedroom door is closed over. She will not get anymore sleep tonight.  
  


* * *

  
Ember Island is silent, and she is the only one awake. It is as if it's holding it's breath in just for her. She should gloat.  
  
She cannot.  
  
The last time she came to this place, she was too young to understand what was expected of her. Then she did not know that war is not always paid for in bloodshed. She does not miss who she was. She cannot afford to miss her. She cannot afford to lose herself in the past. Nothing matters more than the present: the hinges on which turn the future. Azula has always been perfect at discipline; she is perfect at everything she does—because if she isn't, she tries and tries again until she is sweaty and bloody and _perfect_ —but discipline is one of her best qualities. Yet being here throws that to the wind.  
  
Throws everything to the wind.  
  
Here, she stole two ice creams for herself and Zuko from a nearby vendor. After he kicked up a cloud of sand at her, she smeared cold vanilla on his face and he'd cried, alerting their mother. She'd thrown Azula a pinch of her brows and a frowning glance and taken him on the balcony, where she read to him all afternoon. Here, she perfected surfing for the first time and turned to show her mother. But Ursa was helping Zuko practise his form. He giggled as she ticked his underarms, and in a fit of some indescribable emotion, Azula had cruised over to them—effortlessly riding the water—and angled her board so that the water she kicked up splashed Zuko. He sobbed all the way back to the lodge. Azula held her mother's attention for a few moments—and something within her burned bright like flame—but her gaze had turned steely and Azula felt cold once more.  
  
If Ember Island is a respite, then perhaps just this once she can allow herself to remember.  
  
Azula breathes in the dawn air, fresh and cool and tinged with the taste of salt from the sea. In the distance, a solitary figure rides the waves, languid and effortless. And behind her—  
  
Creaking footfalls against wood.  
  
She spins around, already bent at the knees, poised to strike with a smirk to match, and— _oh._ Oh _._ It's Zuko. The air exhales with her, ruffling a single strand of her hair. It hangs down like a vine in front of her eye and she blows it out of her sight. "Morning, darling brother," she coos.  
  
He grunts in acknowledgement—his signature response—before stepping closer and resting his palms on the railing beside her. He's certainly been getting bolder in their time together, no longer waiting to calculate her every twitch, blink and breath in response to anything he does. Azula lets him stew in silence for a while longer, but not too long: she can only imagine what depressing things like to take root in his mind.  
  
And yet, as it happens, he is the one to crumble the silence, turning towards her with a slight furrow to his brow . "Do you ever think about how things used to be?" he asks, back bent, fingers flexing on the railing.  
  
Azula very much struggles to resist the urge to roll her eyes. "No," she says simply, because it is true, and though her voice does not waver, her thoughts do. She looks back at that solitary figure, bites back a frown. It is her nature to guard her emotions like a hawk, and discipline is also her area of expertise, but Ember Island... She lets out a steadying breath, uncoiling the tension wreathed together in her muscles. It is her turn to stew in silence, and she doesn't like it one bit.  
  
"I had a nightmare once, you know."  
  
Zuko's voice edges on cracking, just warbling enough to pique her attention. She drowns her caustic remarks in favour of forward-facing indifference, and it works a charm. He sighs. "Mom held my hand when I woke up. I remembered her saying your name—" Azula froze. That same feeling—pinned, exposed, flayed—shot through her. Cold sunk its teeth into her skin. "—But when I asked her about it, she said it wasn't you. She said she saw a ghost."  
  
Meaning, meaning. There is meaning, there is a reason why he is telling her this. And Azula stays very, very still as her mind sprints to figure out why. He offers her no clues, not even a little hint, as he stares forward, schools his features. _When had he gotten so indiscernible?_ She wishes for one moment—just one, tiny moment—that she was who she used to be, and he was who he used to be, just so she might read him a little better. No other reason.  
  
No other reason.  
 _  
_"Have you ever seen a ghost in the house?"  
  
Azula thinks then of peering into her mirror, stepping so close that the only thing she could see was her face. Her face. Eyes rubbed raw and red, tears like black blood chasing down her cheeks. Maniacal. Pulling back to see her mother behind her. Eyes still welled with pity, hands clasped behind her back. Suffocating. She thinks then of straightening up, staring into her own stained eyes and then her mother's, and wondering— _which of us is real, and which is dead?_  
  
"No."  
  
Zuko doesn't reply. He skulks back towards the balcony door. She knows it is her trademark to spit out a sarcastic remark, to see him off with a scowl, but she cannot tear her eyes away from the solitary surfer.  
  
She cannot let him see the unshed tears that pool along her lashline.  
  


* * *

  
It is known that Lord Sozin is not satisfied.  
  
Iroh, that ancient dimwit, unfortunately first born. Iroh, unfortunately heir to the throne. Iroh, whose capture of Ba Sing Se will win them the war—  
  
 _Would_ win them the war, anyway. if he was remotely competent.  
  
Iroh, the great pillar of a General. Iroh, who has all but crumbled after losing his precious, precious Lu Ten.  
  
His soldiers say he screams at night. In the darkness of his tent with his lungs blown open by nightmares, he screams. Screams for Lu Ten. Screams for Ba Sing Se. Screams for mercy. He screams so fierce that he sends them running. What a power! Azula tests it out on her tongue sometimes, screaming like that. Consorts and servants come running; she delights in the sweat beading on their temples, the bob of their throat as they gulp, the pinched panic seizing their faces. She can't imagine Iroh is the same way. He can't even look them in the eye now, the reports say. (They're hastily scribbled things, handwriting slanted and sloppy, nobody there to discipline them into steady scribes.) Tonight, Azula lays in bed and tries very hard to picture her uncle in his tent. Alone. Terrified. Destined for death.  
  
It is one week to this day that he returns, and it takes them all by surprise. For this reason, there is no fanfare. No street processions, no banners draped from the palace, no ribbons of gossip running through idle servants. And Azula knows at once that this is what he wants. Azula knows at once—  
  
She peers through a trembling gap in blood-red curtains. Flanked by fire, Sozin rise —a phoenix. Flanked by vastness and Azula's secret eyes, Iroh kneels.  
  
"You have failed me," says Sozin simply. Says. He does not bark, nor grit, nor scream the words. But he doesn't need to. His right hand twitches, the fire that courses through him hungry for flesh, and he _says_.  
  
Iroh may be a great general, but first he was a son. He bows his head. "I have."  
  


* * *

  
The moon hangs so high in the sky that it cannot accuse her, so when it's light finally shifts, Azula shifts with it, slipping like shadow into her mother's room. Fine, black hairs ensnared in thin pillars of wood. A dress red as her blood, folded and cut by a single crease. A necklace, golden and unclasped and strewn atop a deep mahogany case. It winks in the moonlight. Azula's small fingers ghost over the cold metal, pinch but don't pull the straggling hairs, trace the crease like a line of scripture. She brings her finger to her eye: thick with dust. The only thing Ursa would ever scold her for was moving her things, and for this Azula knows it should be her giddy desire to twist and grab and launch and shatter. But her touch is like a breath: gentle, soft. Her hands flex tightly around the chain—fingers moving on their own accord as if to yank—but she releases on something dangerously close to instinct.  
  
After this night, she swears she will never return. But the maids will still whisper of a small shadow scampering down the corridors, swinging around corners, burrowing into the darkness of the empty room. A squirrel of the night. They will speak softly to Zuko when they tuck him in bed, leave the door ajar for him to patter out of when time comes. The cook will sneak him a second serving of dessert. And Azula, for once, will bite her tongue. She knows he is not the squirrel—she would have seen him.  
  


* * *

  
Azula is not naive. She never had been. Even as a child, she was not naive. There is no place for naivety in the heir to the Fire Nation throne, and it is why she has always known it would come to this.  
  
In truth... Well, in truth, Azula knows Ozai is going to die today. She will have his crown. She will have his crown because she is _destined_ for it. She might not be the first born, but when the first born is a cowardly traitor forever stained with his failure and the second is as perfect as she is, what use is birth order?  
  
She doesn't need the Dai Li. She doesn't need Mai and Ty Lee. She doesn't need Lo and Li. She needs no-one. _She needs no-one!_ Just herself. This is what she tells herself as she blades off her hair. This is what she tells herself as she stares into her eyes, black as death. And this is what she tells herself as she draws back to see—hovering in the middle of the room, drenched in darkness—her mother.  
  
Suddenly she is little again, patting her own hair, watching inquisitively as Ursa rubs Zuko's head with tender hands. Suddenly she is little again, pelting slices of bread bread at turtleducks like bullets and having them wrestled from her grip by a distraught Zuko. Suddenly her room is cast in orange, outside is black, and she waits on her mother to soothe her back to sleep, but her mother watches with indifferent eyes. Suddenly, suddenly, suddenly. Why is everything so sudden?  
  
"Azula."  
  
How dare she? How dare she say her name like it is something so holy? How dare she say her name as if it is a comfort to her tongue? So easy, so warm, so... unburdened. How dare she, how dare she, how dare she, how dare she!  
  
"Please, Azula. You don't need violence to be worthy."  
  
Azula's fist flies before she can catch it, an impulse like she has never felt before sending it smashing into the mirror. She screams like the sound is eating her throat, but not from pain, and cradles her bloody fist close to her chest. Glass is jutting out from her skin like teeth. Above the vanity, the mirror is cracked—shards dangling, jagged lines of black branching—and smeared with blood. She cannot help the way it bubbles up inside of her, borne of anger and shame and guilt and all else her mother seems to be the oracle of:  
  
She cackles.  
  
"You know that isn't true, mother," she says. _Mother._ The word is like lead on her tongue, hard and heavy and ready to kill. _Mother._ She idly picks out a single shard buried deep in her skin with the same nonchalance as Zuko when he used to pick flowers from the gardens. "I am the heir to the Fire Nation throne. You don't get there through pacifism; your Zuko is a prime example of that." Zuko, Zuko. He'll be coming for her. And she must be the victor. "If you wanted your perfect child, you should have showed up in his mirror instead."  
  
(Angel child. Curious, tender, naive. Zuko had been her antithesis, and look where that got him. She could not change. She would not change. Azula is not naive. She never had been. Never naive enough to believe she could exist free of the violence that blossoms within her like a bountiful fruit. Never naive enough to believe she could exist free of the restraints of who she is. The chains of who she is supposed to be. Devil child.)  
  
Although she cannot bring herself to raise her head, to peer into what is left of the mirror she destroyed, there is pity in her mother's tone. Like always. Pity, pity, pity. Her voice is like a ghost: haunting, stalking, echoing, clawing into her mind. Once real, now... now...  
  
"You do not have to chose between power or love, Azula. This cycle of cruelty is not a way to live."  
  
Azula traces the ornate patterns on the dresser, once gold, turned cerulean by the blue shadow of the room. It eats her, swallows her up, all blue. She flexes her pale hand. Her blood is still red. It is not true. It is not true. All of it, not true. She near snarls, "Mother, I am the evil child. The cruel child. Wicked. The Devil. Don't pretend like this isn't true. I had the choice to be loved or to be feared." She swallows. "You or the world." By an inch, and only an inch, she lifts her head. Catches the hem of her mother's burgundy dress. Remembers tugging on it, tripping on it, ruffling it with grubby hands. She remembers. She is not strong enough to lift more. She is not strong enough. She is not strong.  
  
"I did not choose love."  
  
There is silence, and the world does not fill the silence, so there is empty silence.  
  
"You can choose again—it isn't too late. Continuing like this will only burn you."  
  
For a moment, she blazes. But her fire is quelled. There is no strength left in her to argue. To fight. She wasted it all away. Stomped everything down. Everything. Everything. (Maybe she wants to burn herself. Finish things the way they started: alone.)  
  
"I can't go back."  
  
She is the monster. She is the evil. It has eaten her and consumed all that she ever was, all that she ever could be. It is all that she is. She is the violence that blossoms within her. It is not her blood, it is not her pale flesh, it is not something that lives within her like a beast unknown, a fruit unnamed. It is her.  
  
Like a ghost: "You can't, you're right, but you can go forward. You can choose again. What will you choose?"  
  
Zuko is coming. She will win. She will win. She must win. Zuko will die. She will die. She can choose. She can't choose. Love or power. War or peace. Love and war. She remembers. She remembers and it is a curse that makes a habitat of her soul.  
  
All her life, she has known she would be the heir. Zuko was never an obstacle. There cannot be obstacles in the path of the inevitable, and her fate as Fire Nation ruler was certainly that. There has never been room in her for the good that dwells in Zuko; never been room for desire for anything other than power. _You or the world_. She had never considered both; she had never considered the _You_. Her stomach rolls the way it did that night. Her hand itches for violence: the violence that blossoms within her like a bountiful fruit. The violence that she is. And she never really had a choice, did she?  
  
Did she?  
  
"I would— I would... Argh!"  
  
Azula spins and hurls a winking knife in the direction of her mother. It passes through air and sinks into the wall. With a growl she looks back into the mirror. Her reflection is split into five and tinged with blood as if it were part of her. She brings her weeping fingers to her lips, brushes the blood across her chin and steels. Azula needs nothing but herself and this knowledge: the real cannot touch the phantom, and Zuko must lose.


End file.
